Fiber-to-the-home broadband-access is becoming increasingly popular. Such high capacity communication links provide broadband transmission access capable of reaching all the way to the individual subscribers of a communication network. Known technologies and techniques like classic passive optical networks are standardized in full-service access networks (FSAN). However cost issues do not allow for a large-scale deployment.
Different architectures employ point-to-point transmission and perform opto-electronic conversions to aggregate traffic where electro-optic conversion takes place to transmit to the next point of aggregation in the network. Such techniques, however, require in field power resources. To this point, it has been shown difficult to realize a proper physical layer solution for a low cost fiber-optic access network. Current solutions fall short because they are protocol sensitive, require expensive opto-electronic components and do not scale.